Publications by Year: 1988

1988
The Elusive Executive: Discovering Statistical Patterns in the Presidency
Gary King and Lyn Ragsdale. 1988. The Elusive Executive: Discovering Statistical Patterns in the Presidency. Washington, D.C: Congressional Quarterly Press. Publisher's Version
Statistical Models for Political Science Event Counts: Bias in Conventional Procedures and Evidence for The Exponential Poisson Regression Model
Gary King. 1988. “Statistical Models for Political Science Event Counts: Bias in Conventional Procedures and Evidence for The Exponential Poisson Regression Model.” American Journal of Political Science, 32, Pp. 838-863.Abstract
This paper presents analytical, Monte Carlo, and empirical evidence on models for event count data. Event counts are dependent variables that measure the number of times some event occurs. Counts of international events are probably the most common, but numerous examples exist in every empirical field of the discipline. The results of the analysis below strongly suggest that the way event counts have been analyzed in hundreds of important political science studies have produced statistically and substantively unreliable results. Misspecification, inefficiency, bias, inconsistency, insufficiency, and other problems result from the unknowing application of two common methods that are without theoretical justification or empirical unity in this type of data. I show that the exponential Poisson regression (EPR) model provides analytically, in large samples, and empirically, in small, finite samples, a far superior model and optimal estimator. I also demonstrate the advantage of this methodology in an application to nineteenth-century party switching in the U.S. Congress. Its use by political scientists is strongly encouraged.
Article